Don't feel discouraged! You will be getting there if you are willing and able to dedicate some time.

I'm a beginner myself, probably on the treshold to get in a more intermediate state and sometimes I feel good and the next minute I'm humbled.

I suggest using a cooperative approach: the intermediate and advanced speakers should stay in an easy mode, e.g. no or little use of passive voice. If you have to , why not quickly explaining... just a thought.

The beginner is challenged in return to read through the Gaelic and the translation and to try to learn from it! It's not the more advanced ones' fault if you haven't made it to a higher level. The striving for mastering any skill is always up to the student. There is no teacher present, just friends willing to help and share their knowledge.

Would it make sense to open another thread, like a beginner's Gaelic convo thread? And our advanced/native/fluent speakers would volunteer to read it to lend a helping hand? That would make three levels then, a beginners, intermediate (like this one, please!), and then the advanced chat where the experts can show off, hehe.

The bad thing about my proposal is that there might be too few people willing to contribute, so it may have been a bad idea after all.

That is VERY helpful Faileas!! Tapadh leat!!! I have (another!) question though....

QUOTE

Cumaidh mi ort ri sin.

(lit. I will keep this up)

I understand that this phrase mean "I will keep this up" but which word is which? I haven't learned the word 'Cumaidh' yet.

QUOTE

The beginner is challenged in return to read through the Gaelic and the translation and to try to learn from it! It's not the more advanced ones' fault if you haven't made it to a higher level. The striving for mastering any skill is always up to the student. There is no teacher present, just friends willing to help and share their knowledge.

I am in no way blaming the advanced speakers for my lack of understanding. I am just saying that it's going to fast for me to keep up, as the above example illustrates. I haven't learned the words 'cumaidh', 'ort', 'ri' or 'sin'. So, while I know that the sentence reads "I will keep this up", I have no way of learning each particualr word because I don't know which is which. Granted, I could look it up in a dictionary (which I can't afford to get at the moment) but, then I would just be getting ahead of myself in the learning. It was actually suggested earlier in this thread, that I was perhaps trying to learn too much at one time and getting "over my head". I believe that is true so I have scaled back my learning and have started the taic lessons from the beginning. Which means I can only say, and only know, simple phrases: "Tha mi fuar", "Tha iad trang." things like that. Can't really carry on a "conversation" with just that. The English translations are great, but they don't convey the exact sentence, which is where my problem is. Perhaps, and this might be asking too much, along with the English translation it can be translated exactly as it's written in Gàidhlig so I can figure out which Gàidhlig word (that I haven't learned yet) corresponds to which English word. Does that make any sense at all?

Tapadh leat, a-rithist Faileas!!! As for the typo, I am dyslexic and have a tendency to switch letters like that! I apologize if this confuses anyone!! I'll try to spell check myself, but some typos might get through anyway! The word order in Gàidhlig is exactly what I needed!

--------------------

Sonee

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing" Edmund Burke

"If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it." ~Toni Morrison

Who to has knowledge how long that wil be thisl (Who knows how long this will be?)

As you see, a chairdean , I am putting both literal translation and the more "English" way underneath every word. You will find the English translation directly under the corresponding gaidhlig one to help Sonee' s problem and I think it might generally be a help for other people too. Just a wee thing to the use of a dictionary ... Unfortunately you will find verbs and prepositions only in their basic form ... so you won't find "cumaidh" , which is the future tense - the form you will find is "cum". The same is valid for prepositions - so you won't find "ort" .... The preposition you are looking for here is actually "air". So you see what I am getting at. You won't find the right words if you don't know some of the grammar . For that I recommend things like "Teach yourself Gaelic" or the books from Sabhal Mor Ostaig - Speaking our language. Or the grammar lessons , that our good friend Wizzi here puts together. I just wanted to point out that a dictionary allone wont help you to actually learn the language - and a grammar book alone won't either. Grammar and vocabulary always go together . But in the end you will get there (((((((((Sonnee))))))))

Who to has knowledge how long that wil be thisl (Who knows how long this will be?)

As you see, a chairdean , I am putting both literal translation and the more "English" way underneath every word. You will find the English translation directly under the corresponding gaidhlig one to help Sonee' s problem and I think it might generally be a help for other people too. Just a wee thing to the use of a dictionary ... Unfortunately you will find verbs and prepositions only in their basic form ... so you won't find "cumaidh" , which is the future tense - the form you will find is "cum". The same is valid for prepositions - so you won't find "ort" .... The preposition you are looking for here is actually "air". So you see what I am getting at. You won't find the right words if you don't know some of the grammar . For that I recommend things like "Teach yourself Gaelic" or the books from Sabhal Mor Ostaig - Speaking our language. Or the grammar lessons , that our good friend Wizzi here puts together. I just wanted to point out that a dictionary allone wont help you to actually learn the language - and a grammar book alone won't either. Grammar and vocabulary always go together . But in the end you will get there (((((((((Sonnee))))))))

Madainn mhath, a h-uile duine!!

Tha mi gù math, tapadh leat Faileas!I am good, thank you Faileas

Ciamer a tha thu fhein?How are you, yourself?

Tha i fliuch agus sgothach ann an Nebraska an-diugh.It is wet and cloudy in Nebraska today.

Tapadh leat, for the literal and 'English' translation. I know that it is going to be a hassle for you to do that and I greatly appreciate the effort. I think you hit the problem exactly. Many of the words you all use are not in the online dictionaries I use and I find it frustrating that I can't decipher them and therefore learn them to use myself. Now that I know I'm not going to find them there it should relieve some of the frustration. I will certainly look into getting a grammer book to go along with the dictionary but I'm afraid it will have to wait a bit. School is costing me much more than I imagined and my husband is completely unsupporting in my Gàidhlig studies. He sees them as a waste of time when I could be doing something 'more constructive', so spending any money to further my Gàidhlig studies would be met with great anger, I'm afraid, on the home front. I'm not going to bother or burden you all with my marital difficulties but suffice it to say that if it isn't readily, and freely, found online I'm afraid it's not available to me at the moment. I will do the best I can with what IS available to me and try not to get too frustrated with it. Again, I truly appreciate all the wonderful help you all have been! With friends like you I should have no trouble learning Gàidhlig!

I've been putting off reading this thread. Shame on me. My brain keeps going to German when I try to think of Gaelic translations of anything in this post. Mi Gaelighe chan Eil i math cho mi Gearmailt (lit?:My Gaelic is not good as my German) I probably tortured word order on that... I should read this thread more, and attempt to post to it...

My brain keeps going to German when I try to think of Gaelic translations of anything in this post.

that's an thought worth to pursue!

My native tongue is German but spent many years of my childhood in UK (mainly Stratford upon avon but a little Dundee as well) and US (Schenecdaty, NY). Oddly enough though I never had any troubles understanding English unlike my fellow co-students in Germany, I kept my German accent quite well. For instance listening to lyrics of songs... I never had to read them, just understood. Clearly a result of my childhood.

Now I've lived several years in the US, North Carolina, and I want to keep my accent on purpose, lol. I think and write in English, and we speak stricly German at home for my teenage kids to keep the German.

Anyhow, a year ago I started to learn Gaelic, bytheway something I wanted to 30 (!) years ago. Almost all material is in English.

Funnily, I translate in a completely confused manner. I translate Gaelic-English-Gaelic most of the time, except for numbers. Sometimes I will translate into a German/English mix from the Gaelic. To translate into Gaelic, I have to go via the English.

Like Aaediwen, when my brain goes to foreign languages the output will be English. I have to force myself speaking another language. I can write another language but not speak... odd isn't it?

Ach s' toigh leam an cosnadh agam.But I like my job (lit: "but it pleases me, the job at me.")

Maybe this helps:

toigh (adj): agreeable, pleasant, loved. Is toigh leam: I like (="it is agreeable to me"). Similar to "es gefällt mir."

toighe (noun, f.): care, notice, esteem

toigheach (adj): loving, fond

I know what you mean about the other language(s) trying to horn in. I get yiddish popping up all the time when I try for gaidhlig. In Yiddish, "I like" comes out as "ikh hob lib", and "I dislike" or "I hate" doesn't just negate that, but uses a different word: "Ikh hob faynt" (=germanic "Feind").

I think it's valuable, to know a germanic language when you are learning gaidhlig. In the scots gaidhlig, there are heavy traces of the nordic languages from the vikings. The word for a sheep pen is a "fang" or "fank", for example, which is related to "fangen/Gefängnis". Also, I turned up a word "struidheil", meaning prodigal or wasteful, and it reminded me of the old german didactic story for children, about "Struwwel-peter". There's lots of germanic cognates.